To Have and to Hold (2 page)

Reason had come crashing back, but too late: it was time to pay the price for his folly. Ah, well, who knew, it might even be diverting, a bit of droll fodder at someone's dinner party the next time he went up to London.

The proceedings had already begun, he perceived upon entering the building. A windowless cloakroom preceded the hall of justice, and from its shadowy vantage he heard a voice—the mayor's, he thought-— asking questions, and another man's voice, soft from either reverence or fear, answering. From his angle behind the doorway, Sebastian could see three-quarters of a squarish room, not large, dimly lit by the sun streaming in through high, dusty windows. The justices were out of sight to his right; in front of him was a compact gallery, rough benches behind a railing with room for about twenty spectators, all taken today by sturdy Wyckerlian burgers. A woman sitting at the end of one of the benches stood out from the others by virtue of being better dressed. She wore her yellow hair in old-fashioned ringlets; in her lap was an enormous square of black wool, on which she was knitting fast and furiously. She saw him out of the corner of her eye and looked up, startled. His hiding place was found. Keeping his stick but not his hat, Sebastian made his entrance.

The proceedings came to a halt and every eye fixed on him as he strode unhurriedly to the top of the room. Mayor Eustace Vanstone and his fellow magistrate, a burly, bewhiskered gent with a florid face and stiff military bearing, were seated behind the long side of a rectangular table. "Don't get up," Sebastian admonished when they started to rise, aware that others in the room were standing, too. "Sorry to be late. Glad to see you've gone ahead without me." He shook hands with Vanstone, an elegant, silver-haired man with shrewd and rather ruthless eyes. The other justice was Captain Carnock, whom Sebastian hadn't met before; he had a kinder face, but a handshake that almost shattered his knuckles. Both men had on black robes, but only the mayor wore a wig. Sebastian wore neither; his frock coat and trousers were black, though, and he deemed that judicial enough.

There was an empty chair next to Vanstone's. The mayor was clearly the one in charge, with important-looking papers and documents scattered on the table in front of him. He made a halfhearted show of giving up his place to Sebastian, who said easily, "No, no, stay where you are, I'm fine here," and sat down in the third chair.

Vanstone indicated he wanted a conference; the other two men leaned toward him, and the mayor spoke in a confidential undertone. "Lord D'Aubrey, the case we're presently hearing is that of Hector Pennyways, miller's assistant, charged with lewd conduct and being a public nuisance." He inclined his head toward a fellow standing eight feet away behind a waist-high wooden bar. Dressed in a smock-frock of dirty white drabbet, the accused looked unrepentant but harmless; he had a large, full-moon face, and he waited for his punishment with the stolid vacancy of some bulky farm animal. "To-wit," Vanstone went on, "he became intoxicated at the George and Dragon, went outside and relieved himself in the river—in full view of several passersby, including a woman—and finally fell unconscious against the Maypole on the green, where he remained until the constable was summoned."

The image of it had a coarse, Rabelaisian charm that made Sebastian chuckle—inappropriately, he saw at once, as Vanstone and the captain looked identically unamused, civically dismayed, and judicially set on dealing with this affront to public decency without delay, and certainly without levity.

Without mercy, either. "Sixty days in the lockup and a guinea fine for damages," decreed the mayor, and Carnock nodded in agreement. They glanced perfunctorily at Sebastian, taking his concurrence for granted.

His long legs wouldn't fit comfortably under the table; he swung them to the side and idly tapped his walking stick against the toe of his left boot. "Sixty days?" he mused. It seemed harsh for a crime that wasn't vicious, only inelegant. But Vanstone had the look of a man who knew exactly what penalty matched what crime, plus he had two thick, intimidating law books on the table in front of him. Sebastian shrugged his shoulders, and the case of Hector Penny ways was closed.

The parish constable, a man called Burdy, was tall and rawboned, with an enormous pink nose inked with a map of purple capillaries. He took the defendant by the elbow and hustled him toward a closed door at the back of the room, presumably leading to a holding area of some sort. Minutes later, he reemerged with a new prisoner, a woman this time, accused of stealing her neighbor's laundry from their shared wash line. After her came a few civil suits, boundary disputes and the like, and then they went back to criminal matters: two more public inebriates, a suspected Peeping Tom, a brawler. Nobody had a lawyer, which made self-defense all but impossible; under English jurisprudence, the accused wasn't allowed to speak on his own behalf. An indefensible system, Sebastian had always thought, and one on which the Americans had clearly improved.

The caliber of crime in Wyckerley was nonviolent, venial, and definitely not worth repeating in humorous anecdotes for the delectation of his jaded friends. What surprised him was that he wasn't altogether bored. No matter how trifling or ludicrous the offenses, the people who had perpetrated them were interesting, in their way—at least to look at and speculate upon; closer acquaintance would probably not be edifying, and Sebastian was a firm believer in the axiom that familiarity breeds contempt. But from this distance, and for a little while, their stories entertained him, and he even got an old moral lesson hammered home anew: the poor go to gaol for the same crimes with which the rich aren't even charged.

Eventually the sameness began to wear on him, though. Under the mayor's subtly reproachful eye, Sebastian brought out his watch for the second time in ten minutes. Only four o'clock? This game wasn't fun anymore. Then, too, he and Lili had had champagne instead of food for lunch, and what he could really use right now was a little nap. "How much longer?" he inquired bluntly of the mayor, who leaned toward him and murmured,
sotto voce,
"Only one more now, my lord."

He grunted, watching the constable make his last trip to the prisoners' waiting room. Behind the gallery railing, the woman with all the black knitting began to roll up her handiwork and stuff it into her workbasket with nervous, jerky movements. Around her, the other spectators sat up straighter, whispering or clearing their throats.

Aha, thought Sebastian, it's the last prisoner they've come to see. He turned to Vanstone to ask why. But before he could speak, the door in the back of the room opened and the constable came through, ushering a woman before him.